Poetry Friday, Wills

Because who couldn't use a sonnet on a gloomy Spring Friday? Someone once recited this to me (for reals) as I stood looking down at him from the roof of a cedar-lined stone hut. Yeah, he was a little wacky and it all ended in blood and tears--not the recitation (like I didn't fall from the roof onto him and split my head open and make him cry or anything) but the relationship. Still, I miss him.

Sonnet 17

Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were fill'd with your most high deserts?
Though yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, "This poet lies,
Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces."
So should my papers (yellowed with their age)
Be scorn'd, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be term'd a poet's rage,
And stretched metre of an antique song:
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme.